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Reminds me of the quote from painter James Whistler during a libel trial after he sued the art critic, John Ruskin:

Holker: "Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold? How soon did you knock it off?"
Whistler: "Oh, I 'knock one off' possibly in a couple of days - one day to do the work and another to finish it..."
Holker: "The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?"
Whistler: "No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime."

Same thing for all artists. A lot of people try to commission me to do a painting. They have every detail of the painting in mind. One guy wanted the twin towers with a ghostly firefighter in the sky and a sunset. Another wanted his whole family. Always photo real. They're suprised when you say you want money in return.

As a designer and a contractor, this shit happens all the time. Tip to all starting designers, get a contract that says you get paid every week or two (dependent on trust) regardless of their money situation. They miss a payment, stop working!!! It is ok to say no.

Edit: Also, don't ever work for free for a vague potential future payment.
Edit2: If they do stop paying, you still bill.

Half paid up front, half at completion. Alternatively, if you have some trust in the hiring party, half paid after a midpoint status report, half at completion.

I once worked for a company that did not reserve capital for projects... payment was completely based on their customers paying them on time and them being able to get enough work. If you're hired by a company like that, you are in major risk of being paid late, not fully, or not at all.

Getting a portion up front makes sure they're not like that and that they actually value the work you're about to perform.

Yep, I've been freelancing since June. One client (design shop) has that policy, but didn't tell me that was their policy up front. They paid speedily the first couple invoices, and then started to lag majorly.

This place has a ton of small clients, so it's a lot of maintenance work on many, many different web sites. They want me to make an estimate for pretty much every piece of work that goes beyond one sentence.

I told them how my other subcontracting gigs guarantee payment within 30 days of invoice (yep, they do), made a proposal for them for working terms, and am waiting for their response. Which they said they'd send last week.

I had a client once – really nice guy, but annoying client – who would have me create a separate invoice for every piddling little job I did. I was being paid by the hour and some jobs only involved an hour of my time. He only paid my invoices when THAT PARTICULAR JOB was paid for. What made is even more surreal was that all of the jobs in a week might be for the same client.

This exact thing happened to me. One of the major clients went under, so the company I was contracting for didn't get paid, and they used it as an excuse to not pay me. Almost 2 years later, I'm still owed $3500 and I may have to end up going to small claims to settle for some small amount.

This worked out very well for me on my current project. We did 40-30-30. The client, it turns out, wants too many things out of scope and doesn't want to pay more for them. We had already gotten to the first 30, so we then dropped the client, citing obvious unhappiness on their part. All we missed was the last 30, and he gets something 70% developed that he can take elsewhere, and we aren't stuck working on a project until next spring that should be finished in a few weeks.

That was our whole reason for starting this approach last year. As a buyer of services, I know that my nebulous vision of the final product will not always mesh with the designer's. A 50-50 plan allows a designer to give me junk and say "you're being unreasonable" too early, while a 0-100, 20-80, or escrow-based plan just grinds on the designer/contractor (who may not turn out to be the right person for the job). The 25-25-50 seems to work out best for everyone in our case.

That is pretty fair - but the scary thing is when you design small, yet valuable creatives such as logos. I was ripped off once after having designed a logo. Like an idiot I asked for 20% down payment. The client ran off with my logo and my idea. I don't care much about my .AI/.PDF/*.PSD files.. but I fucking hate when people run away with my ideas.

In my experience, if you can get that great. But usually they won't do half up front, and when they do, they'll try to skimp you on the half at the end. But it's an arguing game, thats why I've backed off the free-lance and only do contract work now.

You can always get that. If you don't, it shouldn't be considered a "paying gig". As a contractor/subcontractor/freelancer for years, I got burned on this exactly once.

If someone doesn't want to pay half up front, you should not expect that they will pay anything at all at the end. If there are trust issues, use an escrow service with arbitration.

I have stayed busy for years and have never experienced anyone refusing half up front, since that first time. First, I know how to avoid those people from the start, even before I answer their RFP.

Secondly, if I do slip up and answer one of those people, they see how long I've been doing this and don't contact me. At first, I used to send people what amounted to a list of things I can do. I'd get people calling and emailing, and when they asked how long I'd been doing this (over 17 years), they couldn't hang up fast enough. These people are the scammers, the ones who want to take advantage of the new kids on the block. I soon figured out that when making first contact, tell them how much experience I have. I get fewer calls, but the ones I get are quality.

I'm speechless. I didn't know people like this even existed. This guy somehow finds it perfectly reasonable that since HIS idea didn't get picked up, that it somehow means his contracted designer shouldn't get paid?

Fer serious? There's people like that in the world? I mean... at least tell me they KNOW it's horseshit, and they're just trying to scam a guy to get a free lunch. I can't believe anyone would actually, factually, really REALLY be that retarded.

They most definitely exist. Not just people, but sometimes whole companies. Some people don't care who they scam to get free stuff. And if their idea does hit big, you still have zero chance of getting paid what you are due. Through experience you figure out ways to identify these assholes early.

figgy.net -- most the work they wanted me to do wasn't billable therefore I didn't get paid well. I'm not sure if this is how they still do business, but they would go through my bill line by line and say 'oh we can't pay you for this...' despite telling me to do it. The breaking point was when they sent me out to return some of their equipment (outside of my normal canon of design), and they thought I was using my car out of the goodness of my heart to run it into the ground for free for them. It caused an argument which ended with the boss saying, 'I guess you should get paid for doing that----but at a very reduced rate'. I QUIT! -- Can you tell I'm still jaded, 5 years later? They also had hour+ long team building meetings on Mondays, that weren't paid, I said if they weren't paid, I wasn't coming, simple as that. These are the reasons I quit. I did get some money, but not nearly what our original agreement was. Again, this was 5 years ago, I hope they improved their business by now.

At my last job, we did IT Managed services. (For the unfamiliar: We were basically a hired IT department for companies too small to justify hiring full time IT staff)

We had a client who always paid for hourly work instead of going on a month-to-month services contract. Every month they were invoiced for more than a contract would have cost them, but every month they haggled over every single time entry and got it down to less than the estimated contract cost. It took nearly an entire day of our management's time and at least an hour or two of my time every month.

Eventually we got them to stop doing that and go with a contract, but only after someone figured out that just agreeing to all of their demands was spurring them on in the first place.

(Not directed directly at you skeletorcares, your post just got it in my head)
Short version: Learn to say "No." You'll be able to turn a profit off the dickheads, or the dickheads will leave to go take advantage of someone else.

Have an hourly client now that spends a pretty good chunk every month. However - before any work can be done, it has to be approved at a partner meeting. We literally have to submit quotes for 1hr of work for urgent stuff and wait a week. Not surprisingly, company-wide uptime is around 90%.

Lots of clients, and potential clients, have a secretary, office manager, or other employee trying to do IT work in house to "save money". Of course, it takes them 10 hours to do 1 hour worth of work, and they forget "pesky stuff" like ACLs. And, when a rogue employee quits and deletes a bunch of files they shouldn't have access to (remember those pesky ACLs?), company X pays (and prays, if they tried to manage backups in house) considerably for a backup restoration.

Yeah, we ran into several of those. At my current job, we don't mind working with those people for one-off stuff or formal implementation projects, but we don't do day-to-day support for them because they really aren't worth the hassle.

Most of our clients right now are of the sort where a high-level exec in the company is in charge of IT and doesn't want to be. That's where we want to be, since the company's already used to IT not being a slave. :)

You can see them in action. Do some searches on Craig's List, and look for "ground floor", "up and coming company", "be a part of the next big thing", "equity", and my favorite, "this is an unpaid internship". There are no internships in programming. Understand this: even those people in India, who charge a fraction of what you need to charge, do not work for free. You don't need to "cut your teeth" by working for free. If you feel you need to do some free work to get experience create your own site, based on a business idea you yourself have. Then, if your idea takes off, great. If not, you haven't added to the problem in this industry by working for free.

As for the "ground floor" opportunities, if you think the idea is great, go for it. But you will not be creating the "next big thing" if the idea exists and is successful. Creating a social network with a particular demographic is NOT the "next big thing". 99% of what's advertised as "the next big thing", isn't, and I'm being very generous.

Quoted below in case it disappears.
"I need a brilliant student web designer to help me build a website. This would be a fabulous opportunity for someone who wants to build their portfolio and have a hand in something that might really be successful. What I require is essentially an amazon.com type site that does all the same things amazon does (though obviously on a smaller scale). Here's the catch...this is a start-up, graduate student run business, so payment for your services (which I will hire on a contract basis) would not be delivered until the site is up and properly functioning. If this sounds like a challenge you are up to, please contact me as soon as possible. This is a time-sensitive project that ideally would be up and running within the next three weeks at the soonest, and mid-December at the latest. If you are a super computer geek and take pride in building something like this, I need YOU. "

Oh my god oh my god, my favourite one on craigslist ever was a Vancouver 'company' looking to trade an indeterminate amount of work in a lead technical position for - here's the kicker- a 10% discount on office space.

Not only would they not pay you, they expected for you to pay them for the privilege of not being paid. Hee.

It's pretty common actually. Especially amongst freelance "entrepreneurs" who hire contract designers/developers to make an idea which was thought of for the sole purpose of making them rich. Most would prefer 100% of the income, and if there are no investors in the product that YOU made, they'll just lick their own wounds and try not to spend anymore money on it.

If you ever work in freelance contracting of any sort, make sure you sniff out bullshit before you work. And as others have said, have billing standards. If a guy like this doesn't pay you once and you continue working, he's not going to be in any rush to pay the next, and will keep pushing the limits until you're not paid at all.

Of course, this only applies to douchebags who want a yacht. People with groundbreaking ideas do exist, and those are the people you want to work for because they genuinely just want to see their idea come to fruition. But there are far more guys who think like 19th century oil prospectors. "This Facebook thingy is a hot commodity! Quick, gather 100 men to make the well while I pick out where I want to build my mansion".

If a guy has a really promising 40-million dollar a year generating idea, but doesn't have any investors, then his idea probably isn't that promising. People who are serious about going into business round up some capital - whether through saving up or through others.

But I bet this guy doesn't have shit, and thinks his next idea will be big, if only other people will do it for him. I bet he sent similar emails to the guy he pegged for coding the web page:

"Hey, so all I need is a page that has a chat function in it with all of your friends. And also one that links to an online store, has a forum, and cool animations on the toolbar. I pretty much want a page that wraps google, twitter, facebook, and amazon.com all into one. I swear once this hits it'll be BIG, and I'll pay you then!"

We were doing a brochure for a client, and we hired an illustrator to do a cutaway product illustration showing off the product's components. After the brochure was mostly done the client made changes to the product, and the illustration more or less had to be completely redone.

Of course, our client only wanted to pay for the final illustration, and thought the illustrator should do the "changes" for free. We tried explaining how ridiculous that was, and eventually we got them to grudgingly pay for it, but that incident combined with about a dozen other problems led to us deciding not to work with that particular client again.

How someone can think that this was okay is beyond me. If I hire a tailor to make me a tweed suit, wait until he's done and then decide what I really wanted was pinstripes, there's not a single person on earth who could reasonably argue that I shouldn't pay for both suits. Nevertheless, when you're dealing with less tangible things like logos and illustrations people for some reason have a harder time valuing the work.

Out of my 12 years of design and development, I'd say about 1/3 of my clients have been that way. One among that 1/3 was a cop. Never paid and stole my site. I was hosting it, but he owned the domain. Shortly after I took his site down it was back up on another host.

I can assure you that this story is real! I have never met the author of this post, but my husband knows Simon Edhouse. In fact my husband almost ended up working for him, but he said the guy was too unfocused and he was like a kid living in lala land. When he sent me this link this morning I laughed so hard I had tears.

NOTE: to all those who might have visited here in relation to a posting by David Thorne, David's story is quite untrue... David is a very angry man, and has a lot of problems. Its quite ironic actually, because I would be quite happy to pay David well for his graphic design, as he is a very good designer and we have the funds to pay him. (the account he has given of our dealings is fictitious) However, David would prefer to slander and defame and make up this kind of silly nonsense. - I have always liked David, but as I said, he has some serious personal issues.

NOTE: to all those who might have visited here in relation to a posting by David Thorne on his website, David's story is of course quite untrue, the emails fraudulent, and we will take appropriate legal action, with the Police and through the Courts.

(To all other victims of David's vicious pranks... shall we form a support group?)

I invoice once a month (web programming and design) for all the hours I've completed per client. They have 4 weeks to pay. If not paid in 4 weeks I stop doing any work for them at all until the invoices are paid. You don't wan to work with people who are not professional enough to pay their bills, it just gets worse and worse. If you have a regular client who nearly always pays on time, cutting them a little slack is not a horrible thing.

I've cut good clients as much as 3 months slack, but they are really, really good clients, and were just going through a rough patch. Glad I did, they've gotten back on track and have paid promptly since and have kept be busy for a year since then.

But new clients? Not a chance. I don't work on credit. If they can't afford to pay you on time, they can't afford you. And if they can afford you and just won't pay on time, RUN.

Lately what I've been doing is I get paid when I leave. If I don't get paid at the end of the day, I don't come back. This way I figure the most I could ever lose is one day worth of work. So far I have not had any problems with this policy. Two years ago I got burned heavily by a client (she still owes me in the four digit range :(. I just let it go) She would keep asking for discounts and discounts on my rate. I cut it by 33% overall, and then to get paid it took like two weeks of straight up pestering her for the money. I just one day got tired of it and said "here's all the information, logins, etc your next tech will need. don't expect me here again, good luck finding someone else" and walked out.

although the other day i had a client pull a move on me that I actually laughed in his face about. i had recommended that they migrate their database platform to another platform because it would save them approximately $300 a month in licensing fees. So I spent the day there transferring all the information over, making sure everything is fine with the new program, etc etc. He actually told me "Let me try out the new program and if Im happy with it, I'll pay you then." I told him no, you pay me before I leave, that's how it works. You don't have your customers come back in three weeks and pay you if they're happy, do you? He then proceeds to disappear, leaving only his secretary. I'm like fine, whatever, and put a boot password on their computers. The next day he calls me pissed. So I head over there and tell him I'll take off the passwords if he pays me. I don't work for free. He pays me and I go ahead and remove the passwords. Seriously wtf?

Yeah, I found that out first hand in photography work. I was taking some photos of a car at an event and its owner asked me to send some shots of him with the car over for his use, saying he'd contact me once that was done to see if they wanted me for a full time photographer position.

Shots sent, no reply. Fuck all.

Oh yeah, since we're calling shots... it was this company. I forget his position within said company:

Interesting. I'm in a similar business to what Marque2 purports to do (I'm in the US) and I can tell you right off the bat after seeing their website I'm deeply skeptical of anything coming from them.

The car "club" business, by itself, just doesn't work -- there have been about 10 over the past few years in the UK that have tried and failed. They often attract guys who are looking for a write-off of their personal collection ("it's for business purposes!"), so they rarely care about the actually business or, for example, about paying photographers. :) I can tell right off the bat what sort of guys you're dealing with -- promise the world, please give me shots for free, no communication. The fact that they advertise "we own our cars - debt free!" means it's a toy project for someone, which has all of the implications mentioned above.

I'm not implying that you should known any of this or known better - just giving some color commentary about the industry :)

I never agreed to charge for the photos, I volunteered them. Never signed anything either. I was naive... but it's not as if these shots are being used on a magazine cover or something.

He never replied. I tried sending the shots 3 times over two or so months, as well as follow up emails to check that they had been received. No reply ever. For all I know he doesn't even work for the firm any more.

I don't have the money to persue something like this legally and I've never seen the shots used in a website or whatever so for all I know he kept them for personal use or didn't receive them at all. In this case I'm kinda content to let the matter drop and chalk it up to experience - that I won't be so easily taken in with promises of work or payment again.

A lot of the time someone will pay just based on the threat, because they don't want to spend the money on a lawyer either - but yeah, it sounds like you don't have a leg to stand on. Oh well, at least you know better now!

Yeah.. I mean cheers for the advice and everything but in this instance it's not worth it. In a way I'm kinda glad to have learned some of the tough things about life before it actually mattered in some major way!

Volunteering photos isn't the same thing as granting a copyright license. He's the one who needs written documentation that he has the rights, not you. Without that, he doesn't have any license to use them.

Always send low resolution previews. And/or preview in person. They may be able to post them on a website (which you can subsequently call them out on). But at least they'll never be able to print them.

If someone asks you to reduce your rate for them, don't do it. It always goes down this same path. Better not to do the work (and not get paid) than to do the work (and not get paid). You've got better things to do with your time, like watch TV.

Or when you first start the work tell them: "Oh, by the way, if you don't pay me I'll kill you. Just kidding." and then pat them on the back somewhat hard a few times in a linearly slowing tempo. -Straight from the Sicilian Handbook of Good Business.

I do freelance on the side and I meet these "massive opportunity" jerks all the time. None of them will ever be successful because I have met the successful ones.

The only successful startup people I've met were those that wanted to create a better product for themselves and didn't give two shits about the money.

Not surprisingly, Steve Chen wanted a site where he could easily upload his own videos onto and pumped his credit cards and savings behind it. Since he made it the way he would want it, its why Youtube.com got brought and he's a billionaire in stocks today even though the business plan sucks and Youtube bleeds millions. He didn't start off with, "Oh I want to make a billion dollars in Google stock". He started off with, "I want a great product that I would use".

I have the same question. Why would someone keep replying?! However, a quick google turns up several profiles for Simon, including such tweets of wisdom as: "...what sound does a tweet make in a forrest when no one is there?" He sounds like a douchemaster5000.

Virtusoft is a marketing focussed software development company working with advanced P2P systems. Virtusoft’s projects and solutions are based on careful consideration of direct and indirect market forces, socio-political changes in the internet marketplace and the cross- referencing of likely future scenarios with appropriate solutions and strategies.

Virtusoft is a software development company that wants to sell you P2P related stuff. The stuff we do is based on how the economy is doing, how people feel about buying stuff online, and laws regarding people buying stuff online. We try and study the history of people buying stuff online so we don't screw up.

Our position generally is that the web has allowed many hundreds of millions of people to download information from ‘servers’ via protocols like DNS, (domain name system) and communicate between each other via email by use of DNS and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). However these protocols, serve to lock users into the ‘client’ paradigm where ‘clients’ have to accept the terms of the businesses that control the web servers.

NOTE: to all those who might have visited here in relation to a posting by David Thorne on his website, David's story is of course quite untrue, the emails fraudulent, and we may take appropriate action. (haven't decided yet) LET ME SAY THIS... Yes, David is a VERY funny guy, and I know his humour and him more than most as we have been friends for years, and worked together. However, the things he has said about me are fabrications, and he does this type of character assassination often and wantonly. - I could laugh too, if I didn't know that he would go on hurting others again and again until someone says, 'enough is enough' i.e. try and be funny without trying to denigrate and humiliate your friends.

David is a very angry man, (with H.A.T.E. self-tattooed on his knuckles) and has many problems. His satirical piece on me is quite ironic actually, because we would be very happy to pay David well for his graphic design, (if he would just do that, but the difficulties working with him outweigh the benefits) He is an excellent designer and we certainly have the funds to pay him. However, David would prefer to slander and defame and make up this kind of silly nonsense than conduct himself in a professional way. - I have always liked David, but as I said, he has some serious personal issues. (To all other victims of David's vicious pranks... shall we form a support group?) - Cheers, Simon.

"Thorne started the 27bslash6 website as a vehicle purely to annoy, as a support to trolling people on Facebook and other social networking sites under the pseudonym Tabitha Gnillort, the girl on the entry page of the site."

Oh Lord, that really hit home. The biggest annoyance of freelancing - the "do this work for free and you can be paid if it makes any money" crowd.

Back when I dabbled in site building, I used to contract with a guy who who had AMAZING OPPORTUNITIES for me every other day. All I had to do was design and build a complete social networking site for X niche group from the ground up, and I could get 5% of any net profit the site made! Of course, this was just because he liked me; he had "a guy in India" who could do it for $74 and could have it done in three days. He just wanted to help me out, see.

I still get emails from him. "A CLASSIFIED AD SYSTEM FOR GETTING AUTOGRAPHS, IT'S A REAL WINNER IDEA. BUILD IT AND YOU CAN HAVE 3% OF NET PROFITS BUT RESPOND SOON THE GUY IN INDIA WILL DO IT FOR A BAG OF TWINKIES AND A SACAJAWEA COIN."

I find it almost difficult to believe that David Thorne is from my hometown. Part of me wants to email him and ask him if he wants to grab a beer sometime, but another part is too scared of ending up as as his latest website entry.

Why do so many people seem to feel that you should be able to get spec work or services at a reduced rate from designers and programmers? Do these people go in for a haircut before a job interview and offer to pay the bill if they get the job? Do they go into a restaurant and haggle over the menu prices?

Cute story, from 1999. Now, if you look at the boss wrong, they fire you and hire one of the six jobless, experienced applicants waiting at home on umemployment. Or, they have already "right-sized" your position overseas.

I would then travel several months back to warn myself against agreeing to do copious amounts of design work for an old man wieding the business plan equivalent of a retarded child poking itself in the eye with a spoon

When I used to be a glassblower I used to always hear the "it only takes you a few minutes/an hour to make that & you want what for it" all the time. My reply was always it took my 10yrs & a few minutes/an hour. Way to give 'em Hell & stand up for yourself in such a humorous manner so that we could all have a laugh!

I lost all of my accounts after the two storms before & then Katrina wiped out the places I sold to along the Gulf Coast. Decided to go back school cause after building my own business for 10 yrs had to start working for a distributor that was trying to make me work for pennies on the dollar. Figured it was as good a time as any to get back in school.

There was a glass blower in Bath (England) when I went there. He looked like fucking Rob Zombie. They made some kick ass light blue pieces of glassworks (for lack of a better word to encompass all the stuff they made). Something to do with the minerals in the water. Very interesting job, sorry you're not doing it anymore, good luck in college :)

So first, I'm unemployed, and an opportunity pops up for me to "intern" for a venture capital consulting firm. I figure that it keeps a hole out of my resume, and I can learn a bunch about geothermal wells (what they wanted me for) and might get a contact in the company they're consulting that will hire me!

No.

Instead, they decided they wanted me to help them with this program designed to "teach innovation to children." Their whole idea was that they could teach innovation, and charge parents for it. What it was was an online course (aka, text on a website) that students would read, and it would take something like 5 hours to learn about all the fun things kids ages 7-17 give a fuck about, like: Alternative energy, Successful business models, Accounting and Finance, etc. It would cost parents like $200.

They gave me a working model of one of the sections of their course, I google searched some of the phrases and, of course, it was plagiarized from various websites. It was my task, and some other interns' tasks, to rewrite it. Naturally, I had questions, the top one being, "how the fuck do you expect people to pay for this shit?" - Needless to say, they had me come in to their office twice for a meeting and then didn't even meet with me for being too busy. I talked with an assistant, specifically about how you can scope something to be for 7-17 year olds since that's such a huge gap, to which she couldn't reply, they hadn't even considered that a concept such as "energy" might be too abstract for a 7 year old, but too simple for a 17 year old.

I gave them the benefit of the doubt too much, it was obvious what they were doing. They were creating some shit product because 1 out of 1000 idiots will try it thinking that if they pay for some shit they can just as easily get by going to wikipedia that their kid will succeed in life and become "innovative." And since they were putting $0 into it, not even giving interns the ability to meet to clarify some things, they weren't going to lose money on it.

When I was young and dumb, I agreed to do a freelance project for my homework group thing. It would interface to the shitty online applications my school was using for rosters and grades and present them in a nice clean way. A stupid idea from the start, because it would use AutoIt to grab the data from the site and reformat it. So if the site changed, the application would break. We're looking at continuous support here.

Anyway, of course I didn't get paid at the start. No no, I would build it, then they would sell it and then everybody got money!

Basically, it meant I slaved away my entire summer earning nothing.

I took all the risk instead of my employer, because I invested my time while all they had to do was wait until I was finished.

The technology allows users to network peer to peer, add contacts, share information and is potentially worth many millions of dollars and your short sightedness just cost you any chance of being involved.

NOTE: to all those who might have visited here in relation to a posting by David Thorne on his website, David's story is of course quite untrue, the emails fraudulent, and we may take appropriate action. (haven't decided yet) LET ME SAY THIS... Yes, David is a VERY funny guy, and I know his humour and him more than most as we have been friends for years, and worked together. However, the things he has said about me are fabrications, and he does this type of character assassination often and wantonly. - I could laugh too, if I didn't know that he would go on hurting others again and again until someone says, 'enough is enough' i.e. try and be funny without trying to denigrate and humiliate your friends.

David is a very angry man, (with H.A.T.E. self-tattooed on his knuckles) and has many problems. His satirical piece on me is quite ironic actually, because we would be very happy to pay David well for his graphic design, (if he would just do that, but the difficulties working with him outweigh the benefits) He is an excellent designer and we certainly have the funds to pay him. However, David would prefer to slander and defame and make up this kind of silly nonsense than conduct himself in a professional way. - I have always liked David, but as I said, he has some serious personal issues. (To all other victims of David's vicious pranks... shall we form a support group?) - Cheers, Simon.

Ah, the life of being a freelance graphic designer. I have one client that I worked with, who contacted me FOUR YEARS after our project was finished, and demanded that I send her a CD with all of her work because she had somehow lost her copy. I sent her a message saying that I was in the middle of a project and couldn't get to her request for awhile. She then threatened to sue me.

For the longest time I thought people were using "orangered" as the past participle of "to oranger", obviously meaning "to make more orange". It made perfect sense. When someone replies to you, your envelope dramatically orangers from grey to orange.

It's funny, you read about people fighting it in programming and design a lot.
It's equally or more common in fine art and music, mainly because so many people seem to be willing to work for free already and most people don't think it's worth anything in the first place.